Voices of Brown

Mike BowlerSun Staff

Lawrence E. Leak

When Lawrence E. Leak's mother went to register her two seventh-grade sons in the fall of 1965, Queen Anne's County officials automatically signed them up at Kennard High School, the county's historically "colored" secondary school.

But the Leaks, a military family just relocated from Germany, were accustomed to the racially mixed schools of the U.S. Defense Department. They insisted on enrolling their sons at Centreville High.

That fall, 11 years after the Brown decision, the Leak brothers and a third African-American, Kevin Ringold, became the first blacks to integrate secondary schools in Queen Anne's.

"The Supreme Court in 1955 called for 'all deliberate speed,' and Queen Anne's County was certainly deliberate," says Leak, 50.

"The administrators went out of their way to make sure we were OK," says Leak, who later became a top official at Towson University, the Maryland State Department of Education and the University of Maryland University College.

"The three of us hung out together in sort of a mutual protection society. Since we were the youngest kids in the school, the older boys found it easy to call us names and push us around. ... But the way we were treated was mixed. Some of the students and teachers were kind."

The Leak brothers' sojourn at Centreville High was short. The family moved west of the Bay Bridge in April 1966.

"We were just getting used to you," the principal told Leak the day he left.

Leah Hasty

Leah Goldsborough Hasty grew up on the Eastern Shore, where her parents were once butler and maid to the family of developer James Rouse. Her route to teaching and public school administration took her from one segregated setting to another: Talbot County public schools, historically black Morgan State College, teaching assignments in segregated Somerset and Harford counties.

But finally, in 1956, she arrived as a young teacher at a newly desegregated school in East Baltimore -- No. 20 at Eden and Federal streets.

"I was assigned there," she remembers. "I was so happy to have a job that I would have gone anywhere."

Hasty says the experience of teaching in a majority-white school "was invigorating. Children are children, and they were then. And parents were parents. They wanted what was best for their kids. Blacks and whites worked well together on the PTA. Those were strong times for education in the city, really."

One thing that struck Hasty: As a freshman at Morgan, and later as a teacher in East Baltimore, she held in her hands brand-new textbooks. That wasn't the case in Hasty's first two teaching posts in Somerset and Harford. Nor had young Leah Goldsborough, growing up in Talbot County, experienced the joy of a new schoolbook. She had always been given hand-me-downs from white schools.

"When they first handed me a new book at Morgan State, it was like Christmas," says Hasty, 72, who went on to a distinguished career as teacher and principal in Baltimore. "I was about 16 and young enough for it to make an impression. Holding a book that wasn't first read in a white school didn't mean a lot to other folks, but it sure did to me."

Joel A. Carrington

The transition to integration was particularly difficult at schools such as Northern High, which is surrounded by white neighborhoods in Northeast Baltimore.

"We had only a small contingent of blacks," said Joel A. Carrington, who was the second African-American to serve as a Northern assistant principal.

He recalled a time in the 1960s when black students, with the school's blessing, organized an assembly celebrating black history.

But white students planned a boycott unless the school held another gathering -- one celebrating white history.

Carrington had an idea. Whites who wanted to boycott the assembly could sit in the cafeteria across a hall.

What happened, Carrington said, was "quite amazing. After about half an hour, when the walls didn't come tumbling down, a few curious white kids ventured across the hall to see what was going on.

"When they didn't return, a few other brave souls" went to the assembly, he said. "By the time the assembly came to a rousing conclusion, there was no one left in the cafeteria."

Carrington, 79, shown above with his wife, Gloria, is long retired from the school system. His 1970 doctoral thesis at the University of Maryland is one of the few detailed studies of the first several years of desegregation in Baltimore schools. "The challenge of desegregation was breaking down misperceptions. That's what we learned in the case of the Northern black history assembly."

Evelyn Chatmon

Evelyn Chatmon had to ride a bus for nearly an hour from her home in Overlea to Loreley Elementary, a two-room schoolhouse with no running water.

Because of the distance students traveled, extracurricular activities when she attended Carver High in Towson -- from basketball games to sock hops -- were held during the school day. Books had been used by white students, and no foreign languages were offered.

But making up for all Chatmon didn't have were parents, teachers and a community raising her to be proud of her heritage.

"Because they told us we were smart and explained to us what racism was and why it existed, and because we knew why slavery came about and who the heroes were, we were able to recognize that it was not anything within us," she said.

"It was what society was dictating, and we could overcome that."

After graduating from still-segregated Carver in 1957 and what is now Coppin State University in 1965, she became a teacher at Victory Villa Elementary in Middle River. The school had no black children and only one other black teacher.

During her first year there, Chatmon presented her class with a spelling list including the word Negro. The children laughed.

"I said ... 'I want you to tell me why you laughed.'

"We had this incredible conversation. ... They said, 'You know ... how those people are.' I said, 'I'm one of those people.'

"I had one kid yell out, 'No, you're not!' I said, 'Look at the color of my skin.' I said, 'Are you laughing at me?' They said, 'Oh, no, ma'am, we would never laugh at you.'

"From that point on, anything about race was open. ... I felt I had really opened the eyes of the students."

The Northwest Baltimore school where Carolyn Holland Cole spent her first few years as a pupil had two rooms, two teachers, no cafeteria, no gym.

It was four blocks from her family's home, while the all-white Arlington Elementary School was just around the corner. Despite its proximity, Cole said, "Arlington was a school we blacks could only fantasize about. We wondered what it would be like going to a school with modern equipment, new textbooks and a big playground and gym."

Cole got her chance to find out in the fall of 1954.

Accompanied by her mother on her first day at Arlington, Cole entered the fourth-grade classroom "all dressed up with new everything, and scared to death. It turned out to be the best experience of my life."

Cole, 58, said her new teacher met her at the classroom door with friendly greeting: "Aren't you a pretty little girl!"

Cole, who is the principal of Frederick Elementary School in Baltimore, never regretted leaving the segregated school on Denmore Avenue. Later, she was among the first blacks to attend the new Pimlico Junior High School and Forest Park High School, both in Northwest Baltimore.

"Frankly," she said, "I think I was so warmly embraced because 95 percent of the kids I went through school with were Jewish, and Jews were a big help in getting Baltimore schools over the desegregation hurdle."

Jo Owen

Jo Owen was teaching at Roland Park Elementary-Junior High when the school navigated the straits of desegregation in the 1960s. It was not an easy trip, says Owen, 80, who taught English and drama.

"It was culture shock for both blacks and whites," says Owen. "We had cafeteria riots and other serious incidents. Some of these kids had never before met kids of the other race, never talked to them. The young whites were particularly fearful."

Owen figured some of the misunderstanding could be alleviated through drama. Aided by Marion Smith, a black music teacher, Owen organized an after-school drama club. Owen opened her club basement to the integrated thespian troupe.

"I can tell you," she says, "that my neighbors had never seen so many black kids."

Owen says she and Smith "would write programs intended to give students a voice to their fears and ambitions."

She also required students to read aloud in front of their classmates. "I did this in every class I had, and then I picked the best of the best. One year it was a young teen-ager named Gregory McGee. "I made Greg realize he could do something the other black boys didn't do -- and really be good at it."

One evening about a decade into retirement, Owen got a call from McGee at home.

" 'A lot of my friends have died or are into drugs or in jail,' Greg told me. 'But what you did was guide me and send me on another path.' "

Owen says his call "made my 16 years of teaching all worthwhile."

Edna Jackson Greer

When the Brown decision came down, Edna Jackson Greer thought, "Now we'll get a chance to go to school with white children. We've heard so many tales about how great it will be."

It wasn't so great after Greer entered Woodbourne Junior High School (now Chinquapin Middle School). Greer was one of only nine blacks in the school, the only one in her homeroom.

Kids called her names, and she cried almost every day, yearning for the comfort and friends of the segregated schools she had left behind.

"What hurt most," says Greer, 57, "was at the end of the day. Whatever we had in common during the school day just stopped cold. There were no invitations to parties or social events. They had their lives, I had mine. You couldn't get personal with a white student. That was the way the world was."

But Greer's father, Samuel Jackson, a government worker, and her mother, Thelma Dorsey Jackson, a Baltimore educator, knew the value of education "and knew that I eventually would build up my self-esteem," says Greer.

Greer survived Woodbourne -- and thrived. She followed in her mother's footsteps, becoming the first black principal of Mount Washington Elementary. She now heads Leith Walk Elementary in Northeast Baltimore.

"I have my parents to thank," Greer says. "They taught me that I can be as smart as anybody -- or even smarter."